Posts Tagged ‘festival’

This last autumn — way back on October 17th — I trucked over to Sasayama to attend the annual Sasayama Autumn Festival (篠山秋祭 — sasayama aki matsuri), which is officially called the Kasuga-jinja Religious Festival (春日神社の祭礼 — kasuga-jinja no sairei) and presumably has its origins as a harvest festival. The matsuri coincides closely with the […]

Last year, on September 22nd, I finally got around to visiting Osaka’s Self Matsuri (or ‘Self Festival’ — セルフ祭 in Japanese), a DIY street festival held in the Shinsekai neighborhood that I’ve wanted to attend ever since it was first organized several years ago. The festival primarily takes place in a branch of the Shinsekai […]

At night the danjiri are decked out in lanterns to sail slowly through the city streets. The pulling crews, done with their daytime racing around, slow their pace to a walking march and young children are recruited to help pull the danjiri. The musicians as well are replaced by a younger crew who are just […]

This year, for the first time in several years, I wasn’t able to attend the Kishiwada Danjiri festival, one of my very favorite Japanese festivals. There are several festivals in the Kansai area that involve the parading of danjiri — essentially giant, elaborately carved portable shrines on wheels — through city streets, but the Kishiwada Danjiri festival […]

Although many people consider the Yamaboko Junkō parade to be the main event of Kyoto’s Gion Matsuri festival, I was really looking forward to seeing the shinkousai (神幸祭 — literally ‘god happiness festival’) at Yasaka-jinja. The origin of Gion Matsuri dates back to 869 AD when a plague ravaged the Kyoto area. Thinking that the […]

Kyoto’s Gion Matsuri festival (祇園祭), which is one of Japan’s “big three” festivals, takes place every year over the course of the entire month of July. Though there are special events scheduled for almost every day during the month of July, what is generally considered the main event — the Yamaboko Junkō (山鉾巡行) parade — […]

This year for Tenjin Matsuri I decided to skip the boat parade and see the 1,ooo-year-old Rikutogyo (陸渡御) procession instead. This procession involves some 3,000 participants who parade from Osaka’s Tenmangu shrine to the Okawa river, where the two golden mikoshi (portable shrines) are ultimately deposited on the boats that will take them up and […]